A Blog on Healthcare from an Indian perspective

Month: December 2013

Last month, I had the opportunity to represent Fortis Healthcare at the World Medical Tourism Congress, held at the Caesar’s Palace, in Las Vegas. The conference was organized by the World Medical Travel Association and had participants from across the world.

Here a few things that stuck me as relevant for a larger discussion.

Medical Travel is now such a huge global phenomenon that we had thousands of people assembling in the wonderful Vegas to discuss how to make sense out of all of this. The conference had the mammoth Caesar’s Palace full, with all rooms sold out. The conference was held simultaneously in multiple conference rooms across the hotel, with folks attending sessions that were of interest to them.

The Congress had various stakeholders in the Medical Travel arena coming on a single platform. These included hospitals, medical facilitators, insurance companies, third party administrators, health plan managers and benefit managers from large corporates interacting with each other. Since the conference was in the Us we had a large number of hospitals from the Latin American countries. These included hospitals from Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina and even the small Dominican Islands. Fortis and Apollo Hospitals were representing India, while we also had hospitals from Turkey, Thailand and even Poland setting up stalls in the display area of the conference.

The Medical Facilitators, whom I met were really from across the world. We had a fairly large number of these who are based in the US and are largely sending patients to Latin America. We also met facilitators from China, Kuwait, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Colombia and Nigeria.

The US seems to be completely in the grip of Obamacare. The law has spawned a small industry of experts, each trying to interpret the complex law in their own way. many experts held forth on how the law was a great opportunity for reforming the healthcare environment in the US. Almost, everyone agreed that the present mess of huge costs and a very large population of the uninsured will certainly be addressed well by the law. There were a lot of doubts on the execution challenges confronting the law and with the health exchanges taking off, all kinds of plans were being bandied about. I believe the law will create new opportunities for medical travel and will open many doors for people to travel and save costs on their medical bills. The travel will probably be more domestic than international, but as time goes by the confusion will clear and this will turnout to be the game-changer in the US healthcare.

While representing an Indian hospital, I was very pleasantly surprised to see the immense goodwill Indian doctors enjoy in the US markets. Most people I met believed that the Indian doctors were the best. Many had seen them at work in their local hospitals and the doctors had apparently impressed with their knowledge, skills and compassion. The other things that stood out as a distinct advantage was the English language (of all things). many wondered at proficiency that we had in the Queen’s language. I sent silent prayers to Thomas McCaulay,who unknowingly and with a completely different intent had introduced the charms of the English language to the natives.

Strangely, while many whom I met were aware of the prowess of Indian doctors, they did not know too much about Indian hospitals. Several people had no idea as to who were the leading players in healthcare in India and what was the value proposition, apart from healthy outcomes. When, we shared our price list with the local facilitators, there were only gasps of complete surprise and disbelief. With a CABG in the US going for USD 105000, our price of USD 7500, was truly unbelievable.

I believe Indian Hospitals need to engage with the US market a lot more. They just don’t know much about us. The government of India and other industry chambers such as CII, FICCI etc. must help facilitate this dialogue. In the conference, many countries were actually represented by their trade bodies promoting Medical Travel and individual hospitals were represented under this broad umbrella.

Finally, my compliments to the organisers. They really put up a massive show, very well organized with clearly defined programs, relevant content and mostly expert speakers. I think we need to have more of these to happen, so that Medical Value Travel really takes off around the world.